CEO to Recruiter: my first week in recruiter’s shoes

CEO to Recruiter: my first week in recruiter’s shoes

I’m Ben Kaminsky, CEO at eva.ai. As we build EVA, our Recruitment Process Automation software, I want to develop a deeper appreciation for the recruiter’s work.

A while ago, I ran into a post by Adam Schoenfeld from Siftrock who set aside part of his CEO duties to walk in the shoes of an interim Sales Development Representative.

Adam suggested that this exercise may be useful for any CXO, and I couldn’t agree more. If you haven’t read his chronicles, I highly recommend it.

Following Adam’s example, I decided to walk in the shoes of a recruiter for a few weeks to have a better understanding of the industries ups and downs.

I’m going to share my findings with you along the way.

Day 2: I got my first job description

It’s a COO at an enterprise food production company.

According to my ”client” Max Knupfer, CPO at eva.ai, it’s one of those jobs recruiters refer to as attempting to catch unicorn tears.

My initial thought was “I got this”. I did build a recruitment platform after all.

I hang up with no questions asked – my first mistake.

Feeling good about my first job, I jotted down all sourcing places I could think of – LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, Totaljobs, executives on the web…

I manually selected the first few filters on Linkedin Recruiter and got started. An hour passed quickly, as my idea of the perfect candidate started to blur.

Who is Max actually looking for?

A job description is great, but if I don’t align with my client early enough to nail down their definition of a strong candidate, I’m wasting precious placing time.

I pulled a few candidates from Linkedin and asked Max for a kickoff meeting.

I wanted to run resumes by him and determine why specific candidates may or may not be a good fit.

As we move along, I wouldn’t stop there.

I see value in collaboration tool to keep in constant contact with hiring managers and clients throughout the recruitment process and fine-tune my search with their feedback.

Day 5: Job board frustration is real

I knew the COO I’m looking for is out there somewhere. It was time to source candidates.

Many recruiters I know sit on a pool of passive candidates they can source from. Since I don’t have that privilege, my instinctive move was to hit the job boards.

I decided to look for candidates manually – as many recruiters have to.

I double checked candidates on Linkedin. Turns out, many find a job quickly and forget to remove their active resume, which leaves me with hundreds of candidates no longer on the market.

Soon enough, I got lost between endless open tabs with different boards.

I haven’t even posted the job yet.

I couldn’t shake off the thought that a proper automation technology would allow me to build a pipeline of candidates long before the job ever sees a job board. More importantly, those candidates would be eager to find a new job.

Next time I hop on job boards, I’ll tackle them with eva.ai and let you know what difference it made.